How to harden your smartphone against stalkers—iPhone edition

Stalkers: sometimes they're coming from inside your phone.

Tweak your Find My Friends app

Find My Friends is Apple's version of Google Latitude, an app that allows you to share your location with friends and see where they are at any given time. Lots of people use Find My Friends, so you may have downloaded it and signed up when it was first launched even if you don't remember doing so. And even if you haven't consciously downloaded and signed yourself up for Find My Friends, someone else might have done so for you in order to be able to keep track of you. You should definitely check up on it in the event that someone might be stalking you.

First, find the app on your phone—if you don't know where it is, swipe your thumb from left to right on your home screen until you get to the search page. Type "Find my friends" into the search box and, if the app is installed on your iPhone, it should come up like so:

Launch the app and log in with your (hopefully newly changed) Apple ID password. Tap on "Me" along the bar on the bottom of the screen, where you'll be able to see your "Followers" (those who are approved to see your location at all times). If there are any individuals following you who you don't want there, tap on their names. This will bring you to another screen that looks like this:

From here, you can both remove this person from following you and you can stop following them if you wish. If you go back to the "Me" screen, there's also a switch that says "Hide from Followers" that you can use liberally whenever you want—turning this on means even your friends who you want to follow you can't see where you are. This is particularly useful if you want to go to extra lengths to protect your privacy, like if you are going out of town or you simply don't want people to get too nosy about what you're up to.

Check your Find My Friends parental restrictions

But wait, there's more! It's possible that you can't change any of the settings we just described. Why? Because someone has set up your phone and locked Find My Friends under the iOS parental settings, meaning you can't turn it off. The real purpose for this feature is to prevent kids from sneaking around behind their parents' backs. But if you had another person set up your phone for you and that person had any kind of suspicious or ill intent, he or she might have chosen to be your "parent" and set you up like the "child" using Find My Friends so you'd never be able to change it.

Find out if someone has enabled parental controls on your iPhone by going to your Settings app > General. Scroll down to "Restrictions"—if it says "on," then someone has enabled the parental controls for some things on your phone. Tap it, and it will ask you for a four-digit pass code:

If you don't know the pass code, then things are about to get hairy. While writing this piece, I tried every conventional method available to get around the parental restrictions pass code that I had set on my own iPhone. I tried restoring from encrypted backup, restoring from non-encrypted backup, and everything in between. None of it worked.

As far as easy-to-perform methods go, it looks like the best bet when faced with this problem is to completely restore your iPhone back to factory settings and set it up as a new device. This is not particularly convenient, but if you suspect that someone is spying on your activities, it's probably better to put yourself through this than the alternative.

If you don't know how to do this, we're going to go through the basic steps.